Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  There it was. In this season’s lecture, his dad’s clarinet symbolized a discarded and irresponsible passion, the musical equivalent of an adolescent fling, or Brad’s interest in architecture, or anything else on the list of things the Bradley men did not do once they became men. Trey considered even a fleeting infatuation with the arts to be a condition one grew out of.

  Trey raised his arm in a sweeping gesture, encompassing not just the study but everything it stood for.

  “Someday you’ll own this house, and your mother and I will be out in Palm Springs playing golf. This is a good room for a hobby. Tear out the bookshelves. I’ll take the desk with me. Make it a wood shop. Make it the place you go to catch your breath and build things.” He put the three wood back in the bag and looked at his son.

  “So. Are we all set?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Brad.

  “Good,” said his father. He hit the MUTE button to bring the sound back up, and the room filled with the Stanford marching band’s rendition of “California Dreamin’.”

  Brad slogged upstairs, opened his laptop, and cut and pasted the Brewster McCloud essay into the last vacant space in Harvard’s online application. Without hesitating, he clicked SUBMIT. There. He had done his dad a big favor and not used the legacy essay.

  He fell back onto his bed. This was what four generations of ambition had bought him, five if he counted those anonymous Welsh ancestors who decided that Tregaron was not the place to start an empire. Brad was heir to enough money to make his grandchildren rich, even if Trey reconsidered and wrote Roger back into the will. The day after he graduated from law school, he could start work at his father’s firm, incurring the resentment of every employee who was not the boss’s son. He could have this house or a bigger one, a weekend place and a philanthropic presence. That was what his mom liked to call it, a philanthropic presence.

  He could inhabit his father’s life. Brad groaned, rolled over, and buried his face in the pillow. The future that Preston Bradley III had in mind for Preston Bradley IV was essentially a maintenance job.

  Maintenance.

  That was Brad’s presumptive fate. Somebody had to manage the family empire, and Brad was the obvious, in fact the only, candidate. Roger was not even in the running. Roger got to dance and Brad got to be responsible. Some reward system: the prize for not driving his parents nuts, it seemed, was the opportunity to continue to do what they thought he ought to do. Brad’s life was to be the epilogue to generations of cumulative success. He was the family’s fiscal tree trimmer. He was the fiduciary pool guy.

  Liz awoke to a silent house on Saturdays. If her room had been darker, or the neighbor’s Chihuahua quieter, she might have slept until noon. But her bedroom curtains were no match for the eastern sun, and the nervous little dog felt a compelling need to chronicle the slightest motion outside the apartment building on the corner, so Liz never got the chance to feel guilty about sleeping through half of her parents’ workday. The greatest indulgence of her weekend morning was to lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, and imagine what might happen next.

  She had to be a little careful when she talked to her parents about the future. They might say they wanted nothing more than for her to go to Harvard, but there had to be a bit of envy tucked into the folds of that dream. How could there not be? Her father had been an engineer who worked on roadway overpasses and hoped someday to build a bridge over water instead of over pavement, and now he drove a cab six days a week. Her mother had all but run a children’s clinic for three doctors, and now she squandered her compassion on patients whose biggest challenge was to look the age they lied about being, and spent her Saturday mornings driving the mother of one of those patients to the beauty salon, because the woman was embarrassed to be seen in Beverly Hills in the van from the assisted-living center. If their lives had unfurled in a logical and just fashion, with the kind of fantastic momentum Los Angeles advertised, they would have had more today than when they started. It did not work that way when passports and job recertification were involved. Liz’s parents had traded personal accomplishment for Liz’s future, which made their ambitions for her complicated. She had to go to Harvard to pay them back, but if she did, the gap between them would be enormous.

  At eight o’clock on an unfettered morning, she wanted nothing more than to fulfill their expectations, not because she wanted to be away from them but because she wanted an education that made her immune to circumstance. She wanted to prepare herself for a career so safe, so essential, that fate would never show up at her door to inform her that her native land had hit the skids and starting tomorrow she would be a cocktail waitress or a dog groomer in a booming oil-rich nation in the Middle East. She wanted always to be in demand, doing something substantial enough to compensate for what had happened to her folks. With a cool pragmatism, she had begun to clip articles about autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s. Nobody was going to figure those out in her lifetime.

  For that matter, she wanted to be at a school where everyone was as smart as or smarter than she was. She wanted never again to walk by a sniggling gaggle of girls who called out to her, “Hey, Ivy, you know, like in League?” Liz had pretty much given up on finding friends at Ocean Heights. She settled instead for working nonstop and told herself it was an investment in a happier future.

  Valedictorian heaven. That was where she would be in the fall.

  She got out of bed, smoothed the sheets and blanket and plumped her pillow, and put on the hoodie and sweatpants Yoonie had brought home on Friday, the store tags still on them, one of the occasional bequests from Dr. Joy, who sometimes bought the wrong color for Katie, or a sweater she did not need. Dr. Joy insisted that it was easier to give the clothes to Yoonie than to take the time to drive back to the Grove or the Promenade to return them, so in a way Liz was doing her a favor by accepting them. Dr. Joy was glad that the girls were the same size, and that was that. She refused to listen to a single word of protest from her nurse.

  Liz was particularly pleased with this latest inheritance, which was incredibly soft, and much more to her liking than the last offering, a wraparound cardigan whose long tails flopped like octopus tentacles unless she bound herself once, twice, three times and tucked up the ends. Liz did not really have taste, which would have required wasting time paying attention to clothes, but she had severe criteria, and she rejected most of what passed for fashion because it was nonsense. There was no structural reason for those ridiculous tails, but the sweats were soft, and loose without being baggy, and a comforting shade that the tag identified as sea foam. She was happy to have them.

  Liz was taller than either of her parents, slender like both of them, and the planes of her face could look harsh when she was tired. The sweats smoothed the edges a bit, and the color made her think of the ocean, which as far as she was concerned was the best thing about Los Angeles. In these clothes, on a solitary morning, Liz almost felt at ease.

  The final copy of her Harvard application was stacked on the kitchen table next to a wax-paper-wrapped bagel with cream cheese and a room temperature chai latte, clearly an early-morning purchase by her father, who equated excessive amounts of dairy products with prosperity. Next to the plate, a coffee cup filled with the pink alyssum that overran everything else Yoonie tried to plant on the parkway. Liz carried the bagel over to the sink, squeezed both halves together until she reached what she considered the proper proportion of bagel to filling, and scraped the extruded cheese into the garbage. She poured the latte into a little saucepan, skimmed off half the foam, and reheated it. Satisfied with breakfast on her own terms, she sat down at the table.

  There were two little adhesive notes attached to the application. The first one, in her mother’s handwriting, reminded her that she had volunteered at the public library the summer after tenth grade, a comparatively insignificant achievement but worth including. The second one, from her father, requested that she count the words in her essay one last time, to make sure that the added phras
e they had discussed the night before did not take it over the five-hundred-word limit. They had heard that some schools simply lopped off the overage and then penalized the applicant for a sentence fragment.

  Liz was sure but never smug, so she reached for a pencil and counted one more time, tapping each word in turn as she whispered, “one, two, three…thirty-eight, thirty-nine…four ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six.” Four hundred and ninety-six words. She reread the essay to make sure she did not have a four-word thought she wanted to insert—and then, as though the counting had made the room too warm, she hopped off the chair and strode into her room, turned on her laptop, added the business about the public library, checked her name and email address, and clicked SUBMIT, all in one single, heady rush. She jumped up again, spun around, ran back down the hall, and flung open the kitchen door. If she had been one of the heroines in any of the movies she had watched during her American musicals phase, she would have burst into song, or at least lip-synched to someone who could carry a tune.

  Gone.

  Liz closed her eyes and saw herself arriving at Harvard for the start of her freshman year. It was a well-worn image, one that had been her secret companion since ninth grade. She was standing on the sidewalk in front of a beautiful, redbrick dormitory, flanked not by her parents but by two effusive, welcoming Harvard undergrads, one boy, one girl, each reaching to help her with a suitcase. There was a light, clean, refreshing breeze, nothing at all like the bully Santa Anas that set the southern California hills on fire every fall. It was, as she envisioned the scene, a Saturday. She had traveled all this way on her own. Her mother had quit Dr. Joy and started working in the emergency room at St. John’s. Her father, who now drove a town car for a private firm, had with great fanfare made her his first fare of the day, before he started shuttling celebrities back and forth to a charity carnival in a park in Beverly Hills.

  That was as far as she ever got. Liz’s imagination had only a supporting role in the private drama known as getting into Harvard; aside from being activated to complete the occasional creative-writing assignment in English class, it was a marginal presence, not quite up to the task of daydreaming on such a grand scale. Harvard’s catalog and website provided Liz with a detailed sense of the physical setting, enough information to create an opening scene—but she had little idea of what she would do once she got there, beyond continuing to excel in class.

  She wandered back into her room and opened the application again, to the screen that contained her essay.

  I traveled across the world to a new home, a new language, a new life, when I was three. I learned English in my kindergarten class, but no one ever had to teach me to be determined, to aspire to a larger life than my immigrant parents could have managed. They decided to change their lives for my benefit. There is no need for me to feel guilty—I did not ask them to do so—but I have a great desire to extend myself out of recognition for what they did. During my high school career, teachers or administrators occasionally asked me to consider taking one less AP, or to cut back on an extracurricular activity, out of concern, they said, that I was taking on too much.

  I know myself better than that—and, as my record attests, I was able to meet the challenge. My parents traded their potential for mine, and I am aware, always, that I must show them how much I appreciate my opportunities.

  She closed the file without reading the rest, suddenly disgusted by how stuffy—how dull, how trite—she sounded.

  “Could you be any more predictable?” she muttered to herself, hoping that Harvard had some kind of remedial class for the children of driven immigrants, one that might help her to develop a sense of humor.

  A west side teen with any self-respect stayed away from the beach in the summer, rather than be mistaken for a tourist and have to endure the indignity of an Iowan leaning across the sand with presumed familiarity to ask, “Where you girls from?” A west side teen knew that the best time to go to the beach was between Halloween and Thanksgiving, when the ambient noise was a self-satisfied purr, not the liberated squeals of normally landlocked visitors, when the beach had everything going for it but too many people. Los Angeles rewarded its full-time residents with an exclusive treat: late fall at the beach felt like late summer in all the places where less fortunate people lived.

  Lauren and Chloe arrived at the beach at eleven o’clock sharp, knowing full well that Katie would be late because she liked to make an entrance, even when the only onlookers were a formation of seagulls watching the tide. Everyone had a girlfriend like Katie, whose biggest crime in elementary school had been the need always to be first in line, first to speak, teacher’s pet, in the front row at the assemblies. She took her pals with her, in those days, to form a flying wedge of energy, and year after year they melted the hearts of adults who got pushiness and independence confused, particularly when it came to girls. Parents approved of their daughters playing with Katie, back then, because Katie was a girl who never let anyone stand in her way.

  It took middle school and puberty to expose the ruthless edge to Katie’s selection process, as girls who had always been at her side suddenly found themselves replaced by girls with prettier hair, any breasts at all, and money to spend on makeup and clothes, as long as none of those assets were competitive with Katie’s. She ditched friends who did not measure up and acquired new ones who did. Her single saving grace was that she did not engage in the kind of high-profile, mean-girl shenanigans that marked a girl for eventual vengeance, or at least she had not so far, though the business about her pretend sex life with Brad had made Lauren wary, in case it signaled a downward spiral. Katie cut and culled her girlfriends using more of a CEO model, refining and improving her associates’ group profile without ever making the rejects feel rejected or the new hires feel temporary.

  Chloe made the cut because she was a goofy mess, and Katie’s notion of alpha-girl perfection required that she have one sidekick who was living proof of her compassionate nature. Lauren survived because she was fun and smart and pretty enough, but not a direct threat in any way. They hung around with Katie, in return, because they always had, and because at this point there was no reason to change. College would take care of that.

  Chloe caught Lauren looking at her cell phone for the third time.

  “Well, c’mon, her time is so much more important than ours,” said Chloe. “Except really she hates herself, that’s what they say about people who are late, you know, she’s so insecure she has to be late, to prove to herself that she matters.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “My mom did. Someplace.”

  “Or maybe she just said it so you’d be on time.”

  “Nice. There she is. Hey, Katie. Katie.”

  Katie ambled across the sand slowly enough for the cute boy in the wetsuit to have second thoughts about leaving the beach so soon. She stopped to pretend to check her cell phone, but when he failed to pursue her, she dismissed him as gay and sped up.

  “You don’t have to yell. Sorry I’m late.”

  Chloe pulled a copy of Nylon out of her bag and turned to the feature on boot heights, hoping for advice on how best to make short legs look longer, certain that the answer would require her to buy something new. Lauren flopped on her back and closed her eyes.

  “Don’t you want to know why I was late?”

  Lauren and Chloe glanced at each other. Katie clearly was not going to sit down unless one of them asked.

  “You had to stop for Tampax?”

  Katie ignored Chloe and turned to face Lauren.

  “I filed.” Without waiting for a reply, she plopped down between her two friends. “So I’m actually not going to stay long. I have to get a dress.”

  Chloe sat up and wriggled her shoulders in a way that made every part of her body shimmy. “Well. We’re special.”

  Katie shrugged. “I need a dress. My folks are taking me out to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate what?” asked Lauren

  �
�I just said. I filed.”

  “Everybody files,” said Chloe. “Don’t most people celebrate when they get in? What if Williams doesn’t take you?”

  “Right,” said Katie. “Or, fine. If they don’t, we won’t go out to dinner then, but for now we are, so I have to get a dress.” She lowered herself carefully onto the blanket, glanced up at the sun, and adjusted her position three times, which required Lauren and Chloe to adjust theirs as well. She untied the straps of her bikini top, wriggled out of her shorts, and tucked all the edges of her bikini bottom around each other, to make it an inch smaller in every direction. She lifted her head and set it down again, once, twice, to make sure that her hair was piled properly beneath it, and then she wiggled one last time, ever so slightly, and let out a tiny resting breath.

  “Is there more?” asked Chloe.

  “So I’m going to the Co-op if anyone wants to come and help me try things on,” said Katie, who knew how to shut Chloe up. Some people wanted to see the Sistine Chapel; if Chloe in fact wanted to see it, and the subject had never come up, she dreamed first of buying her travel wardrobe at Barneys Co-op. The one time Katie had dragged her along, Chloe had come this close to embarrassing them both, swooning over T-shirts indistinguishable from all the other T-shirts in the world except for their three-figure price tags. Katie understood that the whole point of the Co-op was to shop with passion and without emotion, to build a wardrobe and disdain the impulse buy, but Chloe was by nature a Forever 21 girl, happiest in a store where she could buy three sweaters she did not need and still come in well under $100. Still, Katie invited her along, as though Katie were a colonial empire and Chloe a small underdeveloped nation—because it was good for her, because she might learn something. She invited Lauren because she trusted her taste, and because it was nice to have a friend to retrieve another size and bring it back to the fitting room if the salesperson was not around.